Friday, March 29, 2013

Tossing the Point Salad


"Welcome to the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter," Drew Carey was famous for saying at the introduction of the hit improv comedy series, Who's Line is it, Anyway? Lately, I've thought that this same phrase could apply to the that niche-within-a-niche in the boardgame market: complex Eurogames. Afterall, the exotic themes often have much less to do with the mechanics than simply to add a little color to the graphic presentation, and the points...well, there's so many of them to be had, that I can often hear Carey's voice in the back of my head each turn, exclaiming with a smile, "A thousand points for everyone!"

In the comment section of a review of prolific game designer Stefan Feld's newest gamer's game, Bora Bora, Ben McJunkin of the Opioniated Gamers used the term "Point Salad" to describe what has become a popular scoring mechanism in these complex games:

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Motivation

I wrote in an earlier post on why I design games, but recently I took a moment to think about what motivates me to work on a particular design over another one.  It’s true that most designers are never short of game ideas.  I have computer files and 3-ring binders full of them, but since my job (not as a game designer) and family take priority, I only have a limited amount of free time to work on them.  So how do I decide which one to develop further?